At 48, Elon Musk, South African, born in Pretoria, naturalized Canadian in 1988 then American in 2002, managed to send the first space mission inhabited by a private company under the supervision and, in part, the subsidies (3 billions of dollars) from NASA. The Grew Dragon capsule successfully took off on Saturday May 30 at 7:22 p.m. GMT and launched into orbit towards the International Space Station (ISS) where it will be stowed as planned Sunday at 2:30 p.m. GMT.
Does this intrusion by a private party in the form of a PPP partnership with the State open the earth’s orbit to the private sector and to global competition between companies and to tourist trips? Too early to say.
The boss of the SpaceX company, also boss of the Tesla success story, shows it well, the best investment, the riskiest too, is that made in the future. While others watch the curves of Wall Street and the CAC40 under Covid-19, billionaire Elon Musk bets on interplanetary travel and the colonization of the planet Mars.
The “madness” took him 18 years to materialize in the form of a capsule set up before that of Boeing, aligned with the competition from the start. Avant-garde engineer, Elon Musk, who founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp., is the author of several innovative projects that have become essential today, such as Paypal (which responded to a hypothetical X.com online banking project in 1999) or even the car. Tesla electric car.
In 2006, his startup Xspace still holding in his pocket, the young entrepreneur is looking for partners in the American market for the sale of ideas and innovations. Fourteen years later, the South African who left his country at the age of 17 is, with a fortune of 25 billion dollars according to Forbes, the 54 th fortune in the world. Born to change the world, 12-year-old Elon Musk had sold his first video program for $ 500. The boss of Testla (where he is paid in stock options rather than wages) always seems to have a head start on the market, a margin of anticipation which explains his profit. “Do not invest when the achievement is certain but when it is only probable” seems to say the South African to these conservative fund managers who prefer a good old Saudi oil well rather than a promising electric battery but still at childhood stage.
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